Monitors are actually number 2 on my hated list, right behind printers.

Oh my gosh Mike, printers I totally agree...I will say that, at least for me, printers aren't so much of a hassle anymore.

I would calculate that, at one time, printer issues were about %50 of all the IT issues I had to deal with. That includes, physical issues, network, permissions, etc. All bundled up, about half of the issues I had to deal with...but that was years ago. Not as bad these days.

I'm waiting on a good "I tripped and fell in the server closet" story.

I once tripped on a loose fibre cable and killed the primary internet for 5 days while they came out and replaced the cable... That was fun.

A similar thing happened with the BOINC SETI project. someone was doing some building work and dug up the internet cable that connected berkeley to the internet...lol

The largest residential ISP in the city I live in did this to themselves.

They were digging for some reason. Either I don't remember or they didn't say, it was many years ago. The back-hoe dug right through their supply for that hub that supplies the entire city.

A similar thing happened to Republic Airlines back in the day, before they were acquired by Northwest Airlines, who were in turn acquired by Delta.

They had a center near the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport where they calculated all the flight information, including how much fuel to put on each plane so it could do its trip without running out early. The center had two fiber lines, one of which ran in a ring going one way around the Twin Cities and the other line ran in the other direction around the metropolitan area. Great redundancy! They figured they would never go down.

Except for (of course) that last mile, where they both went through the same trench to the center. A backhoe operator pulled up both lines and that was all she wrote. The staff had to go to their manuals and paper to calculate flights by hand.

Sounds like a case of acting too quickly before thinking it through all the way :-). I've done that. Those are the times I tell myself to slow down a little and take it easy.

Once when I was out on a call to restore data on a desktop that was replaced the day before. I brought out the old HDD and placed it on the tailgate of my truck while I got some tools out for another job at that location. As I was coming back out of the bed I forgot the drive was there and kicked it off. It fell and hit the pavement. It looked fine but when I plugged it into the client's machine, dead as a doornail. I told them the previous tech must have damaged it during transit back to our shop. That was the first drive I ever broke by dropping it.

Problem this morning "a user tells you that their monitor isn't working",

Easy, that will take 30 seconds to fix, you can walk there and plug it in.

Reality

Investigate for ten minutes as to why pushing the cable in hasn't fixed it, only to realize you need to order a new monitor...

That's why we keep all the old monitors and cables as employees slowly get approval to upgrade to the curved monitors. It still takes more than a couple of minutes, but at least you don't have to wait days to weeks on shipping.

I have a magic milk crate I keep in my trunk with a seemingly endless array of adapters, peripherals, poe injectors, power bricks, etc. A two hour round trip to and from a satellite office having forgotten that one-cable-I-needed will convince you to stock pile, hahaha.

Problem this morning "a user tells you that their monitor isn't working",

Easy, that will take 30 seconds to fix, you can walk there and plug it in.

Reality

Investigate for ten minutes as to why pushing the cable in hasn't fixed it, only to realise you need to order a new monitor, however the user now cannot work and they must really work today so you have to spend ages finding a machine that isn't in use so you can dismantle it and take the monitor off it and plug it into the users machine. However this newly obtained monitor doesn't have the same connections as the original one so you cant just take the monitor you have to disconnect all the cables. This involves scrambling under desks running cables through cable trays and unscrewing the DVI / VGA screws pulling the cable out of its home only to snag it on other cables and get frustrated. You then put the monitor on the users desk and run the cables into the cable runs feeding it between the mess of cables that are already there and you remove the old cables for the broken monitor. Great you're done, you turn the monitor on.....OH FOR PETES SAKE!! The screen resolution isn't the same as the old monitor so you need to play around with the screen resolution and windows may have reset monitor layouts so you have to extend instead of duplicate displays. Finally the user is up and running. It is at this point you get found by your boss who has been looking for you from the moment you got called away from your desk to fix the monitor issue. They ask where you have been, you tell them, they ask why it took you so long, you tell them, you tell them what your fix was, only to be told that someone needs to use that machine tomorrow for something perceived to be really important. This won't be so bad, you can order a monitor for next day delivery from your supplier and plug it in...so you call them but your supplier is out of stock and won't have any till the end of the week. Now you are screwed, then the main head of the business walks in he tells you off for user X not being able to work for an hour costing the business money and then says, "you know that really important task i needed you to do for me, is it done yet?" you tell them no, they ask why, you tell them about the monitor and they ask, "why did it take so long to change a monitor". Your head explodes at your disbelief.......

This is why no IT job is 30 seconds long.

Same here, except when I start to explain why I took so long to do that job they stop me and say they don't care and I have to do it very fast because is important...You don't say?!

I have something people call my magic drawer. People have a problem (seemingly any problem) and whatever card, cable, adapter is needed to resolve the issue at hand is in that drawer. People always ask me how I do that, I always tell them a good magician doesn't reveal his secrets.

Ages ago at a previous job, I was asked to upgrade Apache on a dedicated server we were hosting. Yeah, sure, no worries, that's normally not a problem.

The box was running Fedora Core 4 at the time. Can't remember the Apache version, but I think it was a major version bump, so likely from 1.3->2.0 or 20.0->2.2.

We agreed that the upgrade would take place after hours, so we scheduled an hour downtime three days ahead to let everyone involved have time to do what they needed to do before I took the server offline.

They told me they were running the stock Apache x.y that was shipped in the FC4 repos (first warning sign).

The day arrived and I started the upgrade.

It was 5pm, Friday afternoon.

I can't remember what it was, but I ran the usual "upgrade this package from the repo, go go go" command and got back that the package wasn't installed. Looked around for a bit and found a source directory for Apache under /usr/local/src. Called the contact and asked wtf and he told me to "just download the new version and compile it with the same options as the last one". I so did, but then Apache didn't want to start because library issues. It required a more recent version of glib than what was installed, so that had to be updated as well. At this point I knew that I wasn't going home early after all.

It was now 6pm.

Glib had, naturally, a host of other dependencies, which had their own dependencies, and so on. I tried upgrading only what I thought would be necessary, and then leave the rest of the mess to the customer's IT guy. Why he couldn't just do this I didn't understand at first, but it was dawning on me why I'd been given this arduous task...

The manual upgrades of a package here and a package there rapidly went pear-shaped. Pretty much every package had some sort of problem that had to be man-handled into submission and even then nothing really worked as it should. I did a full repo update and got a list of nearly 900 packages that were out of date, and I realized that the only way to actually fix this properly, was to do a full reinstall of the system. I even tried undoing some of what I had done, replacing upgraded packages with the outdated ones, and still nothing worked. For what it was worth, the system didn't shut down and die on me...

It was now 11pm.

I called the customer contact again (who was out drinking with his buddies, the bastard) and told him everything was going to sh!t and that I need to do a full reinstall to have any chance of getting anything to work. "Go nuts, I'm counting on you!" he slurred, and I got to work.

Full backup of everything to a fresh machine, nuked the system and did a full reinstall of Fedora, restored the backup (configs, users, databases, data), installed the stock repo package of Apache so that it would be easily upgradeable in the future, got everything working again. The only real improvement was that the new Apache had the same modules compiled as the old one, so the old config slid right in and with a few minor tweaks due to directive changes, it worked.

It was now 7.30am Saturday morning. I went home and had a beer.

Their reaction come Monday morning? "WHY THE !"#% DID YOU SEND US A BILL OF <5-figure sum> WHEN YOU SAID THE UPGRADE WOULD TAKE ONE HOUR TOPS? WHY WAS OUR SERVER DOWN ALL FRIDAY EVENING AND SATURDAY MORNING YOU #!%!#¤ !#"%!#%?"

"Because you had neglected to update ANYTHING over the last 9 months, so NOTHING was upgradeable, and a complete reinstall was the quickest way to get your server back up and running within a reasonable timeframe. Pay the bill and stfu."

When I left the company, they were still customers there, and the bill was paid on the due date.

I'm waiting on a good "I tripped and fell in the server closet" story.

I was playing 2nd fiddle on a huge Cat6 upgrade & we had some issues in an IDF with the multi-decade accumulation of wires in the ceiling. The lead dog decided to spit in the face of OSHA and site rules & climb on a large, heavy, industrial-strength, unsecured steel cabinet to get a better look.

For some unknown reason, he gave the ceiling-tile frame over his head a good shake & of course the cabinet tipped -- instantly and quite forcefully.

Me being who I am, (I run into burning buildings), without thinking (no time for that) I stepped in to catch him. That worked, but the cabinet edge landed right across the top of the arch of my foot!

I was smart enough to leave my shoe on & tightly tied until lunch -- Insta-Splint. No bones were broken AFAIK, but the main blood vessel that runs down the top of my foot changed course forever after that. It took a few weeks before I could walk normally again.

I have a xbuntu desktop machine that's my primary computer at the house. Whatever video card in it a few years ago had to use Nvidia binaries. Every few random updates to X.org the updater would rip out the video driver and install a useless FOSS X.org driver that also somehow killed the GUI and the even made the text console unusable every time.

It started to be a joke that I'd SSH into it from my work windows laptop into the linux box to re-install the binary... then from my Android tablet with keyboard. Then it got real silly when I scripted the whole process and I could fix it from my SSH on my cell phone when it would happen.

Problem this morning "a user tells you that their monitor isn't working",

Easy, that will take 30 seconds to fix, you can walk there and plug it in.

Reality

Investigate for ten minutes as to why pushing the cable in hasn't fixed it, only to realise you need to order a new monitor, however the user now cannot work and they must really work today so you have to spend ages finding a machine that isn't in use so you can dismantle it and take the monitor off it and plug it into the users machine. However this newly obtained monitor doesn't have the same connections as the original one so you cant just take the monitor you have to disconnect all the cables. This involves scrambling under desks running cables through cable trays and unscrewing the DVI / VGA screws pulling the cable out of its home only to snag it on other cables and get frustrated. You then put the monitor on the users desk and run the cables into the cable runs feeding it between the mess of cables that are already there and you remove the old cables for the broken monitor. Great you're done, you turn the monitor on.....OH FOR PETES SAKE!! The screen resolution isn't the same as the old monitor so you need to play around with the screen resolution and windows may have reset monitor layouts so you have to extend instead of duplicate displays. Finally the user is up and running. It is at this point you get found by your boss who has been looking for you from the moment you got called away from your desk to fix the monitor issue. They ask where you have been, you tell them, they ask why it took you so long, you tell them, you tell them what your fix was, only to be told that someone needs to use that machine tomorrow for something perceived to be really important. This won't be so bad, you can order a monitor for next day delivery from your supplier and plug it in...so you call them but your supplier is out of stock and won't have any till the end of the week. Now you are screwed, then the main head of the business walks in he tells you off for user X not being able to work for an hour costing the business money and then says, "you know that really important task i needed you to do for me, is it done yet?" you tell them no, they ask why, you tell them about the monitor and they ask, "why did it take so long to change a monitor". Your head explodes at your disbelief.......

This is why no IT job is 30 seconds long.

Same here, except when I start to explain why I took so long to do that job they stop me and say they don't care and I have to do it very fast because is important...You don't say?!

My least favorite requests from anyone in management are, "I need you to make this a high priority.", or "Move this up to the top of your priority list." As if priority has anything to do with how quickly things get done, or priority will prevent the all-too-common scenarios like the above.